Before I start talking about social media strategies, I will summarize the theory in 3 phrases.

Social media is online community where people create personal profiles and share information with their friends and contacts. (Extracted from a INN346 QUT lecture)

My personal definition: online tools where people create their digital presence providing as much detail as they want to. Those tools allow people to connect other people and it’s not only people to content.

Within social networks, as in any other social circle, some people can be more influent than others. Gladwell suggests that there are three important types of people in social networks: Connectors (“social glue” they know and want to introduce you to everyone), Mavens (“information brokers” can’t wait to tell you about the best deal and give advice) and Salesmen (“evangelists” get you to act and convince you to buy)

Now it’s time to explore how Social Media fits in the Enterprise.

Processes:

In my view the majority of outcomes from social media come from external sources. Contacting the customers/users, and in my opinion 3 process can easily benefit from social media:

1 – Recruiting: Don’t wait for CVs, go to market and offer the job to the right person. Also the company can check the qualification and previous experience of candidates.

3 – Supporting (post sales): post sale support, don’t only sell but keep the support active. Companies can use facebook groups or google+ groups. For example groups of users that owns a Sansung Galaxy III Android 3.2. And then users can support users. Stanley Milgram’s Small World Experiment would take place here.

Tools x Process

Tool

Highlights

Processes supported

Facebook

Easy to identify groups with similar interests. Companies looking for product’s feedback usually try contacting facebook groups. Also, people tend to participate in groups that share information about specific subjects. Ideal for product supporting strategy

Supporting (post sales), Marketing (sales)

Google+

Google strategy to compete with facebook. Actually, google has a previous product called orkut (in India and Brazil orkut is more famous then facebook).

Supporting (post sales), Marketing (sales)

Youtube

If a picture is worth a thousand words. A video is worth a thousand pictures. Make a nice presentation of your product and share it online.

Marketing (sales)

Linkedin (This tool will be explored in our case study – Suncorp HR)

Don’t wait for CVs, select good people that fit in the role and contact them offering an opportunity. That’s the market new trend.

Recruiting

Pintrest

Is Pinterest worth bothering with? Is it going to be as big as Facebook? Here’s a newsflash: it already beats Facebook for the number of purchasing customers it sends to retail sites, according to a recent Social Shopping 2012 survey.

Marketing (sales)

Strategy:

1) Verify where your target is (map the online social network structure of your business)

2) Keep someone dedicated to the social media. At least check and answer questions in a daily basis. If the company does not interact the credibility is down. This person should also moderate the discussion and filter inappropriate comments (based on internal policy)

3) Identify people having high influence and reward than (that can guarantee the viral propagation)

Recruitment process improvement for Suncorp HR:

Currently, Suncorp HR is not exploring all the potential of linkedin, facebook and google+ in their recruitment process. Therefore we are proposing some strategies to improve that:

How to map out the social media structure to the target market (in that case the target market are future Suncorp employees)?

Select one employee within HR department to dedicate 2 hours per day filtering people in 3 major backgrounds using LinkedIn search engine (e.g. IT, car insurance and investments). Contact that people and add them as part of Suncorp HR department network.

If a new role is available, Suncorp HR already has a pre filtered list of possible candidates. So, they can contact them and offer the opportunity. That should reduce the time to get good people selected for interview.

In addition. Suncorp can use facebook and google+ to check more information about the candidates previously selected (e.g. hobbies, interests, etc)

All that mapping can be done automatically using online tools such as wildfire and trackur

How to identify, help activate and reward online connectors?

Filter current Suncorp employees in linkedIn and add them to Suncorp HR netword. Then check the connectivity between current employees and previous selected list. Ask the employees to recommend or not the people in the selected list. That can help Suncorp to prioritize interviews.

Suncorp already has an internal skills database. That contains information about all employees’ background. Our suggestion is a new information in that database to add the LinkedIn url (if applicable)

Maintain a counter for indication per employee and provide gifts for indication (e.g. cinema tickets, amazon.com gift card, etc). The most active contributor (usually 1-3%) can even receive a bonus package (money reward)

How to systematically identify ways to propagate the viral contribution and referral factor?

The same HR employee responsible to dedicated 2 hour per day contacting people via linkedIn will be responsible to identity employees’ contribution and indications. Therefore the most active contributors will be identified. Those most active contributors will be asked to dedicate part time of their job to help HR and the working hours will be accounted to the HR project in parallel to their normal working hours.

Do you believe this strategy can help Suncorp HR to improve their current recruitment process?

If you are involved with Quality Assurance you certainly have heard about ISO and ISO 9000 . Basically the concept involves a set of standards and best practices to help organizations to be more productive and effective in their business processes. Well, that was a trend early in 2000/2001, also every organization used to have an effort to be ISO certified.

Today, there are other sets of standards and best practices helping companies to enhance the productivity and effectiveness. In my opinion 3 standards and best practice frameworks dominates the market currently:

All those methodologies must produce artifacts in order to guarantee the productivity and effectiveness promised. Therefore a software tool would be interesting in order to create the artifact and maintain it in a collaborative format.

Strategy

Wiki style tools can fit perfectly producing the management artifacts demanded by methodologies like Prince2, ITIL and Agile. see some examples in the table bellow:

New software releases, descriptions about configuration items and Knowledge database used by the Service Desk are typical documents produced in a collaborative way. Due to the dynamic life cycle of this documents a tool in wiki style will be very useful

Agile

Iteration Plan (Timetable)

Task and task status

In the past Microsoft Project used to be the most famous tool for creating and managing timelines. But that’s gone. Today each team member can update their own task completion and status.

Tactics

I have already comment about the company called Atlassian in this post.

The first point is they are evangelist of the E2.0 concept, and they have two excellent tools with very competitive prices (you can even start using for free). One is called Jira, very good for tasks management, deliverable, releases, and bug tracking. And the other tools is called Confluence, a excellent way to produce documents in a collaborative way we can even produce BPMN models using the online gliffy tool. I strongly suggest you to take a look in the marketing video of both tools.

How to fit that strategy to a HR department

Currently our INN346 team is exploring treats and opportunities in a HR department where we can apply web2.0 tools to help them maximize some benefits and achieve some outcomes. Therefore, we will try to apply the strategy to that scenario.

Well, needless to say HR departments also have timelines and tasks to be achieve, therefore from the Management point of view they can be using wiki style tools for managing those activities.

The HR department can explore their Business process using Gliffy. BPMN notation is not only used by IT, today many internal business processes has been modeled using BPMN. They can share information about annual leave via a confluence page for example.

I am still working in the wiki application in a HR Department. Do you have any suggestion?

Are you familiar with Prince2, ITIL or Agile? Which artifact you usually create? Have you tried a wiki style tool to create then? Do you think that would work?

In my previous post I talked about the Accenture adoption for Enterprise 2.0 and the massive campaign inside the company to incentive collaboration from employees, that was back in 2009 and I was there 🙂

Well, I contacted Angela Gordon who has done the presentation about Collaboration 2.0 (that’s the Accenture’s official name for their E2.0 tool set). I asked her about some numbers since Collaboration 2.0 was released and here are some numbers from Accenture’s ROI:

Some cost savings declared:

– More than 20 million minutes of company-standard monthly VoIP audio/video usage

In my view the numbers explored by Accenture shows only a reducing in telecommunication costs. But where is the core ROI? Where is the measure for collaboration and knowledge sharing? In fact, there is no simple answer for those questions.

Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, are hiring economists, anthropologists, and other social scientists to map and classify new types of friendships—and put a value on them (see the article “The value of virtual friends”)

Measuring improved knowledge retention isn’t easy – the KM (Knowledge Management) guys are pondering this space for more than 20 years – thus, measuring the effects of a more collaborative corporate environment and a knowledge sharing culture that we may get via Enterprise 2.0 can’t be much easier (see this article from www.frogpond.de)

From the references provided in the end of this blog I came up with a list of possible outcomes to be considered in ROI for E2.0:

1) Less Waste and Duplication. For example reducing the amount of email and instance message by posting a blog or wiki page (this example was also explored by Jason Watson, Enterprise 2.0 QUT lecturer)

2) Knowledge Retention. Even if the bloger left the company the post will be still there, that is part of company’s intellectual asset.

3) Improved Productivity. That’s one that I am reluctant to accept, as there is extra time to be expended to post a blog or wiki. However, there is a sample from Oracle support for example where they reduced the number of support calls by stimulating technical employees to blog technical articles (I have already posted about that here)

4) Better leverage of assets and increased innovation, I get these two from this article but I couldn’t identify any real example. Let’s try to clarify these two points in our discussions.

5) Identifying “oracles”(that doesn’t mean the company Oracle by people who are good source of questions, who offers good answers). That is the best return of investment in my opinion. I can imagine how hard is for a company to identify who are the people that really owns the knowledge, who’s most asked employee. TransUnion is studying usage data to learn who’s best at solving business problems raised in the social network. With that, it’s experimenting with new job descriptions for a couple of them, so that handling these questions within the forum is a formal part of their role. (see the article).

This idea of identifying “oracles” and creating a role to them is fantastic, and it’s easy to see why TransUnion saved $2.5 million while spending about $50,000 on a social networking platform.

Would you be happy if your company could identify you as a good source for answers? What if your new role involves bloging and answering forum’s questions 8 hours per day?

In my previous post I explored some key benefits of applying the Enterprise 2.0 concept across the organization. From the discussions and common sense I concluded the second main aspect of E2.0, after the collaborative environment, is the openness.

But how open should we be in regards of company’s information? Where is the limit for confidentiality? What are the limits in general?

This week I will describe some limits I had to respect when I worked for a company called Accenture from 2007 to 2009. We had a very clear social media policy to be assigned by all employees.

Background

Accenture is one of the largest IT consulting companies in the world with more than 240,000 employees and offices in more than 120 countries. Also they can be considered an early adopter for Enterprise 2.0. Actually I remember they gave they own name for the Enterprise 2.0 effort across the company, that was (and still is) called Collaboration 2.0 and includes the basic E2.0 tool set (blogging, micro blogging, media exchange, feeds, etc).

Basically they customized some very know benefits from Enterprise 2.0 and applied a very well defined strategy using a Social Media Framework.

The Tiger Woods case

The famous golf player Tiger Woods used to be part of Accenture’s Marketing strategy. I bet you have seen some outdoor, or airport screen showing a Tiger Woods pictures and the Accenture Marketing (High Performance Delivery).

Well, all was going well until Tiger Woods had a personal problem with his ex-wife and that incident had a negative impact on his career. Needless to say two days after Accenture post this note:

“For the past six years, Accenture and Tiger Woods have had a very successful sponsorship arrangement and his achievements on the golf course have been a powerful metaphor for business success in Accenture’s advertising. However, given the circumstances of the last two weeks, after careful consideration and analysis, the company has determined that he is no longer the right representative for its advertising. Accenture said that it wishes only the best for Tiger Woods and his family. NEW YORK; Dec. 13, 2009 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN)”

Accenture Internal policies

The impact of the Tiger Woods incident for Accenture was minimum. No posts were added to twitter or personal blogs in relation to the incident, internal discussions and speculation did not happen. In my opinion the employees had in mind the strict policies in place and decided not taken the risk. (see more information about the case impact)

I would like to mention three important parts of Accenture social media policy; I will not share the full document due to confidentiality aspects:

Some sites, such as LinkedIn, allow members to “recommend” current or former co-workers. Accenture forbids staff (including associates) to participate in employee recommendations for reasons of company liability. All communication of this type should be referred to Human Resources for verification.

The policy documentation also describes guidelines such as: Be judicious, Write what you know, Perception is reality, Are you adding value? And Your responsibility.

I totally agree that a policy is compulsory for any organization adopting E2.0. The Accenture policy covers all the main aspects to be considered in a Social Media policy such as intellectual property and guidelines for posting.

What are are the most important aspects for a Social Media policy in your opinion?

Ross Dawson explores some key benefits of the Enterprise 2.0 adoption in the chapter 4 of his book. Today, I will explore the key benefit productivity & efficiency and share a personal use case scenario.

When it comes to efficient project management, people from different management methodologies such as PMI, Prince2 and even Agile would agree that one mandatory component for any project is the task breakdown, or product breakdown and then tasks/activities definition (what, who and when). And from that definition, usually a project manager comes up with a timetable and effort estimation.

I remember about 6 years ago when our development team used to have a meeting to define effort estimation, then the project manager used to create a schedule (normally a timetable using Microsoft Project tool), and periodically he used to consult the current activity status with each team member. And from that the project manager used to create a status report and share across the team and other stakeholders.

Well, that was before the Enterprise 2.0 paradigm inundates the companies. What I have seen currently is we still have the meeting to define effort, but the task definition (what, who and when) is now using collaborative tools such as the fantastic Jira. See the video

Using a phrase from Andrew McAffee: “Web 2.0 is an attitude, not a technology”, I completely agree that the tool used in the past (Microsoft Project) worked very well from a long period. But today, people don’t need the project manager to ask each team member about the task status. In a collaborative environment, we update our status by ourselves, and also we can “follow” other tasks from other team member, so we can receive for example RSS syndication when a dependent task has been completed. I have used Jira in my last two projects and I can tell you with no doubt that tool increased our productivity and efficiency.

Jira is produced by a company called Atlassian. That company one of the biggest Enterprise 2.0 evangelist in the word, and they produce excellent tools for Enterprise 2.0 such as Jira and Confluence (wiki style tool). Also there is an excellent blog from an Atlassian employee called Bill Arconati. And two excellent presentations about massive wiki adoption strategies and techniques for growing your wiki.

Risk scenario

Still using the same scenario and same Jira tool, I would like to explore a negative impact related to information Security and Confidentiality also listed by Ross Dawson in his book. Sometimes, some information within the project such as task and timeline are supposed to be confidential, even internally in the company. Therefore we need to be carefully about openness and filter the team members properly to avoid loss of confidentiality.

Reading the Wikinomics blog (http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/) and exploring the new business model presented (Peering; Being Open; Sharing; Acting Global) where the collaboration is the key, all those concepts make perfect sense to me. And there is no doubt the wikipedia creators explored those concepts in a fantastic way.

However, the business model presented forced my mind back to early 90’s, I know must readers are not IT related people, but as you known I am IT centric, and my life experience is surrounded by IT. Moreover, I am pretty sure any non IT people know what the brand Microsoft means. Also, if you lived in 90’s, you know what the name Bill Gates means and you know what the IT market dominance from Microsoft means. Now, let’s have a look in some stats about Microsoft:

As I said, I am not going to explore the Microsoft’s market drop; I just want to use this as an Enterprise 2.0 in action example, and that happened back in the 90’s. I remember very clearly some Microsoft competitors like linux based companies (e.g. Red Hat, Suse, Slackware), or Database competitor such as MySQL, or companies like SUN (has been bough by Oracle in 2006), all of them talking about the concept of OpenSource (suggest reading for basic concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software, very good reading: http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html)

In my opinion the Open Source ideology fits perfectly in the new business model presented:

Peering:

An open source software component or system can get contributions from graduate students, consultants and experienced developers at the same time.

Being Open:

Nothing can more open than the Open-Source Paradigm.

Sharing:

Open source is called Architecture of Participation. The code by itself owns to the community. And the community shares the intellectual participation.

Acting Global:

To give an example the linux compilation Slackware receives collaboration from developers living in 23 different countries.

The tools that enabled that Open Source style are the used today for code repository and code sharing (e.g. SVN, CVS, Git, Microsoft VSS, etc).

Can we consider code repository and Open-source approach as Enterprise 2.0?

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Enterprise 2.0 in action today

Wiki style

As a software developer there are 3 sets of information produced all the time by my team. And they are vital for our day-by-day activities:

These 3 set of information are produced in collaboration by different team members, also the information is very dynamic, they change all the time.

Needless to say, a wiki style tool fits perfectly for that scenario. In my last three consulting companies we have been using a wiki style tool for those sets of information because we need: collaboration from the team to produce the info, easily changed style, centralized. So, WIKI as my first Enterprise 2.0 tool in action currently.

Professional Social Media (linkein.com)

Working for a consultant company, I have been all the time to update my CV. And I remember the nightmare to keep my CV’s up to date in a centralized repository some years ago.

Thanks for the professional Social Media (linkein.com) as tool to keep your CV centralized, also we can enjoy all the beauty of a social media, like finding your previous work-mates, keep tracking about your previous companies web sites, receiving recommendations, etc.

My current company is using linkein as a official tool, and when a new potential client ask for a consultant portfolio, our company sends out our linkein URL. Isn’t that fantastic?

I’ve been working in the IT market since 1998 when I finished my Bachelor Degree in Computer Science. Since then I have been working as Software Developer for small consulting companies and big consulting companies like IBM and Accenture (progressing from Junior, Intermediate, Senior and Specialist). I know I still have millions of things to learn and improve, but I can certainly say that I saw (or should I say I am still seeing) a clear paradigm shift related to knowledge management inside the companies I have worked. The old fashioned approach of using Intranets or Knowledge Database to share information has been replaced by wikis and blogs. Technical forums still survive, but they have been replaced more and more by technical blogs, because the most active forum member realized they can conquer followers rather than being a simple active forum member (I will explore that topic Forums x Blogs in other post).

Therefore, the main purpose of this blog will be to share my real life experience while transitioning between paradigms and living now what is called Enterprise 2.0, which in a nutshell is the use of web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, tagging tools, etc, in a corporate (enterprise) environment.

Also, I am currently enrolled in a QUT unit called Enterprise 2.0, so the second purpose of that blog will be establishing a network with my QUT colleagues and sharing my thoughts about the concepts explored in the unit.

I believe that telling stories (successful stories and bad stories) that happened in my IT career related to knowledge management will keep the posts always interesting. Also that would be very good to obtain feedback from my colleagues about similar situations and how they deal with that.

As I am starting the blog now, I need you guys to divulgate my blog to your friends if you think the stories are interesting. Also I am going to divulgate the blog to my QUT colleagues.

To finalize I would like to mention an excellent technical blog about SOA and Oracle SOA Suite, the best technical blog in that field in my opinion

And to give you a suggestion about an excellent blog about Enterprise 2.0, I suggest http://enterprise2blog.com/. I like that blog because the writer explores the basic concepts behind Enterprise 2.0 using real experiences samples.